I currently have a 4gb memory, 500 gb HDD laptop and I've been looking into buying a nice laptop or desktop. What specs would you recommend for my new machine?

and I've been reading post about how alot of members have2-5 computers and a bunch of equipment. I thought vmware was used so you dont have to buy or use so many actual computers. I dont know, I'm a newbie..forgive me

Vmware is your friend. So is RAM and in my opinion, a SSD if you can swing it.

My "lab" consists of my 4 year old PC running Ubuntu with Vmware Workstation, 4gb of ram and a shiny new SSD. I have various windows operating systems and a few Linux operating systems as guest OSs. I can run two or three at a time without any issues, this is mainly due to the SSD. I basically put my OS on the SSD and only my VMs, the rest of my data goes on slower drives.

If you've got a few extra bucks to spend, I'd get a PC with a 64 bit processor, lots of RAM and a SSD. Can you tell I'm excited about my new SSD?

PS - Just ran some benchmark tests and my old HD had averaged about 60 MB/s and the new one is about 270...

thanks for the advice... how much memory would you recommend 4,6,8? and should I get a laptop or desktop..desktop would be cheaper, but it would be cool to take my pentest lab with me where ever i went.

I currently run mine off of one laptop with 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD (and an iCore 3 processor) I use Virtualbox and I run 3 guests at a time without any issues. I also have a WRT54GS and an Alfa card for wifi. I also have a spare laptop my wife no longer uses (Core 2 duo, 4GB RAM, 320GB), but it runs pretty hot, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that yet. Maybe just host targets guests with Virtualbox...

You can never have enough RAM. Get as much as you can afford or as much as your motherboard can handle. From a HD perspective, I dont actually use that much. My biggest HD is 2TB but that is only for backups.

Think about it this way, if all your VMs are just for pwning and testing, they're not going to use a lot of RAM nor are they going have big vmdk files. So, unless you want every flavor of every Operating System ever created, you dont really need that much. I think 150 GB is probably enough. Like I said above, I have about 5 VMs, they're all on a drive that is 128 GB, in addition to my OS and I still have plenty of space left.

However, Hayabusa brings up a good point about snapshots, if you're going to use them, then make sure you have enough space! I use snaps lightly so I dont need too much extra space for them.

As one of those people that have up to 4 boxes running in the lab at a time. Mostly they're old hardware that I've upgraded from didn't want to get rid of. We build them up over time.

Currently my lab is my IBM / Lenovo T60, 4 gigs of ram (I did the upgrade), a new processor (I did that upgrade too), and a 320 gig hard drive (yeah I did that too). It has Debian Linux as the host OS, with Ubuntu, Backtrack, 2 windows boxes, and soon a De-ICE box.

I'm looking for something decent for my next lab box. 16 gig, would love 2 physical processors, several terabytes of storage, and the ablity to hold a couple of Nvidia GPU.